in parting


DELIVERED BY THE SEA: a Japanese fishing float on


South Moresby Island. PHOTO: DAVE QUINN


T h e S e a r c h


>> ON HECATE STRAIT, B.C., a storm-wracked beach with a steep pile of driftwood and flotsam that extended into the haunting, moss-draped chaos of forest above the gravel, my hunt be- gan. Bottles and driftwood and fishing floats had been tossed into there by some fierce winter storm. Torpedo-shaped buoys, basketball-sized buoys, plastic buoys, metal buoys, netting, rope, lighters, oil cans, shampoo bottles, a whole plas- tic hardhat, a car bumper, mangled chunks of aluminum boat hull. But, goddamn, no glass balls. Jonathan Raban, in Passage to Juneau, says


the West Coast natives were the first to find Japanese glass fishing floats, along with wreck- age with iron and copper fittings and other Asian artifacts washed in on the Kuroshio Current and the North Pacific Drift. They believed, he writes, that these things floated in from submarine civilizations inhabited by the mythical creatures Komogwa and Nazunakas—like a couple of “fat undersea emperors.” “In effect, the Indians had dreamed Japan into


being, but located it, like Atlantis, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.” Glass balls adrift from a magic kingdom of the


sea—how I dreamed of finding one! On Princess Royal Island, I poked around in the huge driftwood piles on two beaches, found a yel-


50 | | ADVENTURE KAYAK spring 2007


low roadway sign to pound on like a drum, mark- er pens and highlighters and driftwood. Found wolf trails, tufts of fur, a favourite howling spot, even a wolf—a real wolf at the end of the beach. On the Brooks Peninsula, windbound, I


searched for glass balls. Found: A plastic fish- ing buoy with Japanese characters on it, half full of water, bleach bottles, fish floats, blocks of Styrofoam, a jar of salad dressing, plastic water bottles, Tide laundry detergent bottles, very little glass and no glass balls. Saw bear tracks, walked around an island,


faced the sun and watched water pound home. Fragrant spruce sap on my fingers. Plastic bot- tles under mossy driftwood in groves of salal in the middle of the island, brought there by his- toric storms. All these things, no glass balls. But by this time


it was just an excuse to go walking. Scrambled over rocks, plants I’d never seen, tidepools of eelgrass and anemone and crab, stagnant pools green with algae, bones, shells of butter clams and moon snails, worn round pebbles, a group of seals lying on the rocks by a large tide pool on the other side of the island. A boomer that, just once, refracted and sent a house-sized pyramid of water straight up with an exclamation mark of white atop, backlit by sun, green as glass. Glass! —Tim Shuff


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52